V Anamika's latest Chennai exhibition challenges our connection with technology

In an age where machines constantly ask us to prove we’re human with a checkbox, artist V Anamika flips the question back at us: what actually makes us human? Her new exhibition, I’m Not a Robot, curated by N Ramachandran, springs from this tension—between the mechanical world we depend on and the fragile, intuitive human mind we so often overlook.

Anamika wants visitors to introspect into themselves with this exhibit

“This show is a kind of introspection,” she says. “What are we missing, at what point are we departing or engaging with technology, and what is it exactly doing to us?”

Across her mixed-media works, Anamika blends digital elements with hand-drawn forms, historical images, and fragments of collective memory. The show is an archive of instincts, fears, and inherited knowledge, layered with the sensitivity of someone who observes the world with an unfiltered lens.

For her, these collected visuals examine “the stored knowledge” or the acquired knowledge. “What is a human without the knowledge he has learned?” asks Anamika.

This question runs like a pulse through the exhibition. In several works, she uses drawings of her own body parts set against symbolic forms to explore what she calls “the split personality between the knowledge side and the emotional side.”

As our lives become increasingly automated, she feels we are losing the very balance that anchors us.

With the exhibition, she urges visitors to sit with this discomfort—the subtle drift away from emotional intelligence, empathy, and instinct. “I want them to really introspect into themselves, what makes them a human. That’s the main highlight of the show.”

Through I’m Not a Robot, she invites us not just to look but to pause—to confront a world where convenience grows, yet connection matters.

Open to all. On till November 28. 10 am to 6 pm. At Alliance Française de Madras, Nungambakkam.

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